I am making a Star Wars cake for my neighbor, and to give her an idea of the design I showed her this picture:

http://cakecentral.com/gallery/1516052

She seems to prefer the look of fondant, but I talked her into BC, since fondant hates me, and she said she liked the look of the buttercream in this picture. But now I'm worried it's not going to look as good and she'll be disappointed. I think I can get the BC pretty smooth, but I'm worried it will look dull. The cake in the picture is airbrushed black. I don't have an airbrush or a steamer, so is my cake going to look dull in comparison? Any tips for making it look better?

Anyone? Mostly I just want to know if black buttercream will have a dull finish if I just put the food color in the BC. I tried to search for images with black frosting, but I guess most people don't want all that food coloring.

I used black buttercream a few times, it wasn't dull. However it takes a lot of black to get a good color.

Better give them a heads up about eating all that black buttercream........black lips and gums..lol.

How does your neighbor feel about using chocolate buttercream? If you start with it for the black icing, you won't have to add so much coloring, and, my chocolate buttercream anyways, often has more of that (greasy?) shine to it. Although you could probably achieve the same thing by decreasing your powdered sugar ever so slightly. That might make your icing a little softer than you prefer though.

It depends on the icing recipe..I get a really good shiny black because I use WBH which is a whipped bakery icing and the colors always look shiny.Almost like a IMBC or SMBC.Most BC's look dull.

Now that I think about it...could it be that my chocolate is so shiny because it's an all-butter recipe? Just a thought.

I was planning on doing chocolate buttercream. I guess I'll have to experiment and see how it looks before I frost the cake. Wish me luck! I always have such high expectations, fall short, but then everyone seems to love it anyway. I guess I'm my own worst critic. Now if I can just make up my mind over which white cake recipe to make.

Well, I finished! It wasn't as "shiny" as the original, but I'm really happy with how it turned out!

http://cakecentral.com/gallery/2137131

Great job!! Kudos for doing all that work!!